Growing up, we thought the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was the gold standard for drug regulation and new medical treatments. However, recently, we’ve realized otherwise.

Amid increasing distrust of scientific institutions, a 2021 study by the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that, when it comes to public health, nearly half of Americans don’t trust institutions such as the FDA, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). While this study documented low levels of public trust in governmental health organizations during the pandemic, skepticism in the time of COVID-19 was influenced by preexisting distrust of public health recommendations.

The FDA recently requested $7.2 billion for its 2024 budget -- an increase of $372 million from 2023. However, missing from that request is urgently-needed support for FDA enforcement of clinical trial transparency, despite thousands (and counting) of trials not reporting results as required by law.

Opinion piece in MedPage Today by Megan Curtin, Navya Dasari, and Justin Mendoza, MPH

Universities Allied for Essential Medicines (UAEM) North America, with assistance from Columbia Law School’s Science, Health and Information Clinic (SHIC), filed a citizen petition at the Food & Drug Administration (FDA) on February 27th to urge the agency to improve enforcement of clinical trial transparency. Transparency laws require public access to studies on drugs and medical devices, benefitting patients and researchers, but FDA has underenforced the law, keeping potentially life-saving data from the public.